Social media platforms are frequently used to share information and opinions around vaccinations. The more often a message is reshared, the wider the reach of the message and potential influence it may have on shaping people’s opinions to get vaccinated or not. We used a negative binomial regression to investigate whether a message’s linguistic characteristics (degree of concreteness, emotional arousal, and sentiment) and user characteristics (political ideology and number of followers) may influence users’ decisions to reshare tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine. We analyzed US English-language tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine between May 2020 and October 2021 ( N = 236,054). Tweets with positive and high-arousal words were more often retweeted than negative, low-arousal tweets. Tweets with abstract words were more often retweeted than tweets with concrete words. In addition, while Liberal users were more likely to have tweets with a positive sentiment reshared. Conservative users were more likely to have tweets with a negative sentiment reshared. Our results can inform public health messaging on how to best phrase vaccine information to impact engagement and information resharing, and potentially persuade a wider set of people to get vaccinated.

Working from home has become common practice for many, especially since the global pandemic has forced many office workers to relocate their work spaces to a home environment. While working from home can have benefits, it requires self-discipline and can be a challenge to stay motivated. Changes in motivation about work may impact people's sense of productivity and well-being. We used a mixed-methods study using diaries and interviews with 25 informants to investigate perceived challenges during remote work from home. A grounded theory analysis revealed that people's work motivation had shifted from being people-centric to being work-centric. In the office, informants were motivated by working and interacting with others and being at their desk signaled work engagement to others. At home, motivation was mainly driven by personal work responsibilities. We identify four clusters of worker strategies to address the shift in work motivation. While some informants' perspectives on motivation made them reflect inward on their work performance and enjoyment, other informants' perspectives were outward-facing and involved performance and enjoyment in relation to others. We conclude that there needs to be better support for sustaining work motivation at home that can be tailored to different individuals, specifically in terms of managing time and detaching from work. We conclude by considering new pathways for supporting remote work.

We present a design fiction, which is set in the near future as significant Mars habitation begins. Our goal in creating this fiction is to address current work-life issues on Earth and Mars in the future. With shelter-in-place measures, established norms of productivity and relaxation have been shaken. The fiction creates an opportunity to explore boundaries between work and life, which are changing with shelter-in-place and will continue to change. Our work includes two primary artifacts: (1) a propaganda recruitment poster and (2) a fictional narrative account. The former paints the work-life on Mars as heroic, fulfilling, and fun. The latter provides a contrast that depicts the lived experience of early Mars inhabitants. Our statement draws from our design fiction in order to reflect on the structure of work, stress identification and management, family and work-family communication, and the role of automation.

Abstract Sheet-defined functions (SDFs) bring modularity and abstraction to the world of spreadsheets. Alas, end users naturally write SDFs that work over fixed-size arrays, which limits their reusability. To help end user programmers write more reusable SDFs, we describe a principled approach to generalising such functions to become elastic SDFs that work over inputs of arbitrary size. We prove that under natural, checkable conditions, our algorithm returns the principal generalisation of an input SDF. We describe a formal semantics and several efficient implementation strategies for elastic SDFs. A user study with spreadsheet users compares the human experience of programming with elastic SDFs to the alternative of relying on array-processing combinators. Our user study finds that the cognitive load of elastic SDFs is lower than for SDFs with map/reduce array combinators, the closest alternative solution.

Many computer tasks involve looking up information from different sources, and these self-interruptions can be disruptive. In this article, we investigate whether giving people feedback on how long they are away from their task influences their self-interruption behaviour. We conducted a contextual inquiry on self-interruption behaviour in an office workplace. Participants were observed to postpone physical interruptions until a convenient moment in the task if they were expected to take time. In contrast, observations revealed that digital interruptions were addressed immediately; participants reported these were presumed to be quick to deal with. To increase awareness of time spent on digital interruptions, we developed TimeToFocus, a notification tool showing people the duration of their interruptions while working on a task. A field study deployment of TimeToFocus in an office workplace found that feedback on the duration of interruptions made participants reflect on what they were doing during interruptions. They reported that they used this insight to avoid task-irrelevant activities. To confirm whether participants’ perceptions of the benefit of the tool could be measured, we conducted an online experiment, where participants had to retrieve information from an email sent to their personal email addresses and enter it into a spreadsheet. Participants who used our tool made shorter interruptions, completed the spreadsheet task faster and made fewer data entry errors. We conclude that feedback on the length of interruptions can assist users in focusing on their primary task and thus improve productivity.